The Wild Girl (3 page)

Billy Flowers had answered his calling early in life, when the Voice told him to go into the wilds of his native Mississippi and slay the creatures of forest and field. Even after he had grown to manhood, married, and had three children, the Voice would not allow him to rest. And he had no choice but to obey. He finally abandoned his family (although these many years later he still sent money home to his wife and now-grown children) to hunt his way through the south, virtually exterminating single-handedly the black bear in Louisiana before moving on to the canebrakes of Texas. There, in the fall of the year 1907, in the prime of his life, he had served as Teddy Roosevelt’s chief huntsman on a much-publicized two-week bear hunt. A “religious fanatic,” TR had called Billy Flowers in a newspaper account of the presidential safari, simply because Flowers had refused to hunt or allow his dogs to do so on the Sabbath, even though on Monday he had gotten the president his trophy—a lean, immature she-bear, newspaper photos of which gave rise to the nation’s “Teddy Bear” craze.

From Texas, Flowers kept drifting west, looking for open country to wander and varmints to hunt. He eventually settled in the Southwest, though
settled
was the wrong word. He had no home of his own and spent the better part of the year on the move, living mostly in the mountains with his dogs, only occasionally accepting temporary winter lodgings in the outbuildings of some of the ranchers to whom he contracted his services.

Thus the years had passed, and Billy Flowers became an old man, his hair and beard growing long and white, until he resembled an Old Testament prophet, and a half-crazy one at that, with his searing bright blue eyes. He tallied his kill in notebooks from which, with the hubris typical of many eccentrics, loners, and fanatics, he planned eventually to write his autobiography, under the deluded notion that people would actually be interested in reading about his solitary, violent life as an exterminator of wild creatures. Since he had arrived in the Southwest, he had killed 547 mountain lions and 143 bears. A few years before, he had killed what was very likely the last grizzly bear in the region, a huge, ancient creature, missing two toes off its left front foot, its front tusks worn to the gums. Flowers had tracked the bear for three weeks, from the New Mexico bootheel into the mountains of Sonora and Chihuahua. There he had finally trapped it in a steel-jawed leg trap, which the old grizzly dragged all the way back across the border before Billy Flowers caught up to him and dispatched him. He sent the hide and skull to the National Museum in Washington. The last grizzly bear in the Southwest.

Now, from astride his mule on the ridge above the river bottom, Billy Flowers heard his lead dog, a lanky Walker-bluetick mix named Monk, “barking treed.” He turned the mule, a pale gray named John the Baptist, touched him lightly with his spurs, leaned back in the saddle, and gave him his head, letting the animal pick his own way down the steep rocky slope. John the Baptist was clever and sure-footed, stepping quickly and expertly from rock to rock, squatting low on his rear legs to slide on the loose scree. By the time they reached the bottom of the incline, Flowers heard the other dogs join Monk, taking up the same distinct baying sound that told him, whatever it was, they had the creature up a tree.

He clucked the mule into a run, splashing across the shallow river to find his dogs, all seven of them in perfect biblical symmetry, baying furiously at the base of an oak tree partway up the far slope. The dogs stood on their hind legs, scratching wildly at the tree trunk, alternately leaping and twisting in the air like performing circus dogs, all the while barking and howling their frustrations.

Flowers could not yet make out through the leafy canopy what quarry they had treed, but as he approached he could hear the creature hissing and spitting, and though he knew that it was not a lion, he had no idea what on earth it might be, for it was not a sound he had ever before heard on this earth. He reined up his mule, swung from the saddle, and slipped his rifle from the scabbard. As their master approached, the dogs’ baying became even more frenzied, anticipating the moment that he shot the animal from the tree and they were rewarded for their efforts by being allowed to tear open its gut and feast upon its entrails and organs.

Although Billy Flowers was no longer young, he was still wiry and strong, and he was a man without fear of man or beast. He had wrestled alligators in the swamps of Louisiana, choked the life from rattlesnakes and water moccasins with his bare hands, killed grizzlies and lions in close combat with a knife. He believed that he had seen just about everything there was to see in the wilds, but he was entirely unprepared for the creature he beheld now in the oak tree, hissing and growling, trying to strike out at his dogs with its hands as if it had claws on the end of its slender fingers. He wondered for a moment if this might be the devil himself, come finally to test him, taking the form of this wild creature, half human, half animal, squatting nearly naked in a tree, shredded clothes falling from its slight body, hair tangled and filthy. The creature had dirty yellow stripes painted crudely on its face, framing eyes black and bottomless as time itself, and filled with a scalding rage as it growled, spat, and swiped at his dogs.

And then with a sense of relief so vague that he hardly noticed it himself, he realized that the creature was not Satan at all, only perhaps Satan’s vessel, a heathen, and a spectacularly unclean one at that. Flowers had been advised when he first came down into Mexico that a small band of wild Apaches still inhabited the hidden canyons and valleys of the Sierra Madre, the high mountain country so rugged and inaccessible that few white men had ever seen it and most Mexicans were afraid to pass there. But Billy Flowers had always traveled alone and feared heathens no more than he did man or beast, of which he considered them to be simply a kind of hybrid. He could see now beneath the rags and the filth that this one was a girl, barely more than a child, and he called off his dogs, who were instantly obedient, quit their baying and began to pace around the base of the tree, panting, slavering, whining, their bony ribs heaving. The girl fell still herself, silent and watchful.

“‘Thou shalt break the heathen with a rod of iron,’”
said Billy Flowers in incantation, raising his rifle to his shoulder.
“‘Thou shalt dash them to pieces like a potter’s vessel.’”
He looked into the girl’s eyes and could find there no hint of fear in her bold, strangely calm gaze, no suggestion even of a shared humanity. It was exactly like looking into the eyes of a lion or a bear, as he had done so many times before in his life in that decisive moment before he dispatched them, their eyes luminescent, impenetrable, casting back only his own reflection.

Flowers lowered his rifle, slipped it back into the scabbard that hung from his saddle, shook his head and muttered to himself in some disgust. It had been revealed to him, the face of his own fear—the vision of Satan in the person of a child, this young girl. He knew that the Mexican government had recently reinstated the bounty on Apache scalps in an attempt to rid the country once and for all of the scourge of savages that had plagued them for so many generations. Yet, though this would certainly be a legal kill, Billy Flowers had never before taken another human being’s life, and he would not do so now, even one so primitive and so far from God as this one.

Flowers reached into his saddlebag and brought out a small package of waxed paper, which he unfolded to reveal a single tortilla folded around a piece of honeycomb from a beehive he had raided earlier. He carried very little food when he was hunting, eating mostly what he killed, believing that the flesh of the lion and the bear gave him and his dogs the strength of the animal. But he had a weakness for sweets and had never been able to resist honey.

Now he stepped forward again, peering up at this wild child in the tree, unwrapped the tortilla, and watched as the girl cut her eyes to it, the dogs, too, attentive to his every move. “I expect you’re hungry, heathen,” he said in a voice not without some measure of kindness. He pulled off a piece of the tortilla, squeezing honey onto it from the piece of hive like a sponge. “Yessir, missy,” he said, taking a bite, chewing slowly, licking his fingers with great care and relish. “I expect you’re mighty hungry.” He pulled off another piece and reached it up toward her. “Here. Go on. Take it.”

The girl watched him impassively, but made no move to accept his offering.

The old man studied her, finally nodded. “No, I don’t suppose I’ll get you down out of that tree until I put the dogs up, will I?” he said.

He folded the tortilla and honeycomb back up in the wax paper and slipped it into the breast pocket of his shirt. Then he turned to the mule and pulled his dog chains from a saddlebag. He led the dogs lower down the slope to a grove of mesquite saplings, where he tethered each in turn to a tree.

“All right, little missy,” he said, coming back up to the girl, “come on down out of that tree. Dogs won’t harm you now.” He slipped the tortilla out his pocket and waved it toward her, making it clear that if she wanted it she would have to come down for it.

She looked at the tortilla, then at Flowers, then at the dogs. He held it up again. “Come, have a little bite to eat,” he said, talking mainly for the comfort of hearing his own voice, in the same way that he often spoke to his dogs, who were for months at a time his only companions, addressing them just as if they were people and understood his every word. “Dogs are put up, child. I’m not going to hurt you.”

Without taking her eyes from him, the girl began to climb out of the tree, dropping quiet as a spirit from the lowest limb to the ground, the tatters of her dress fluttering faintly with a sound like distant birds on the wing. Flowers couldn’t help but notice the wild grace of her movement, a kind of otherworldliness, in the same way that the coyote and the wolf have a gait so distinct from that of the domestic dog.

“Won’t do you any good to try to run off,” he warned her. “I’ll let them loose after you again, and this time they catch you they’ll tear your heart out.” He reached out the tortilla to the girl, but still she made no move to take it from him. “I will give you a shirt to wear, child,” he said, vaguely unsettled by the unfamiliar sight of the girl’s small brown breasts visible through her shredded dress. “You’re practically naked. And by
God Almighty,
I am told that I’m a strongly aromatic fellow myself, having only rare opportunity to bathe, but you child, yours is an unholy scent. You stink like a beast of the wilds. It is no wonder that my dogs took you for a varmint.”

The girl watched him, her eyes so dark that they appeared black, the sclera itself coffee-colored, an anatomical difference for which the “White Eyes” had gained their name. Billy Flowers had known some Apaches over the years; he had trailed game through their reservations in Arizona and New Mexico, and in general he found them to be a squalid, indolent sort, given to drink and gaming, a people for whose salvation he held out scant hope. But this child was different, untamed and of an earlier race of man altogether, a prehistoric being.

“I’m afraid that the Good Lord has his work cut out with you, young lady,” Flowers said. Then he turned back toward his mule to fetch his shirt with which to cover the heathen girl’s nakedness.

THE NOTEBOOKS OF NED GILES, 1932

7 DECEMBER, 1999

Albuquerque, New Mexico

A man’s memory is the faultiest of instruments, vulnerable to retrospection and revisionism, altered by age and distance, skewed by heartbreak, disappointment, and vanity, tainted always by the inconsolable hope that the past was somehow different than we really knew it to be. This is why memoirs are always, by definition, false. But a photograph never lies. I think it is what attracted me to the form originally. My own memory is largely visual, the years and decades of my life defined by images, hundreds of thousands of photographs taken over the past half century, although what has become of most of them I could not say. It hardly matters anymore; I don’t need to look at the images themselves in order to remember, for they live on perfectly preserved in my mind; I can see the light and composition of each, the specific expression on a subject’s face, a sweep of landscape, the naked truth of an empty room, sunlight spilling across a doorway, the door itself half open, the mystery inside.

I close my eyes and see with perfect recall a dark-eyed girl of my youth running down a dry arroyo. She is slight, strong, fierce, her skin the color of a chestnut, her hair black and thick as a mane. I freeze her in my camera lens, but she moves on like a dream, refusing to be stilled. Many people believe that a photograph is an inanimate object, time stopped, frozen in place. But it is not. It is only that specific moment between what just was and what is about to come, a single moment alive and moving forever between past and future.